Hands-on: Surface Pro 3

The Surface Pro 3 is Microsoft’s own hardware, and also the handheld gaming platform Microsoft was pushing, so upgrading it to Windows 10 really shouldn’t be a problem.

I bought the regular version of the Surface Pro 3, then picked up a key on eBay to upgrade it to Windows 8.1 Pro, so the Windows 10 upgrade I got was naturally Pro too.

The upgrade itself went smoothly. Just like everyone else: reserved the Windows 10 upgrade, downloaded it ahead of time, upgraded directly. The process was fast, and then I ran into a few problems:

1. Surface Pro 3 deep standby drains the battery too fast

The Surface Pro has a deep standby mode — sleep, basically — but after upgrading to Windows 10, power consumption in that mode was high, losing 30% of the battery overnight. I called support, and they told me to open Device Manager, delete the drivers for the two devices under “Power,” then reset all power plans and reboot.

Amazingly, that fixed it. Standby power consumption went back to normal after that.

2. Touchscreen problems

After upgrading to Windows 10, the touchscreen kept registering phantom taps. If I tapped the top, it would randomly tap the bottom. On inspection, the tempered glass screen protector seemed to be lifting a bit at the edges. My initial guess is that it’s the protector, so I’ll swap in a new one and see.

3. Charger broke

While upgrading to Windows 10, my charger broke. Well, not exactly broke… more like the white light on the magnetic charging head stopped lighting up…

I called Microsoft and said the white light on my Surface Pro 3 charger wasn’t lighting up.

They asked, “Does it charge?”

I said, “Yes.”

“If it charges, isn’t that normal?”

“But that white light not being on bothers me…”

“………………”

They said they’d check with their supervisor, then asked me to read out the charger’s serial number and said they’d send a new one…

Whether that solves it remains to be seen.

Those are the problems I ran into after upgrading my Surface Pro 3 to Windows 10. Everything else was normal. Just for reference.